A Street In Brazil

My son spent a few weeks in Brazil recently and took hundreds of photos. This was designed from one of those.​

http://www.dailypaintworks.com/buy/auction/501030

Long Road Home

Original painting - starting bid $30.00. With my son driving, I took a bunch of smartphone snapshots of the dramatic cloud formations on a Sunday afternoon traveling home on I-40.​

http://www.dailypaintworks.com/buy/auction/499385

West Tennessee Honey

My brother raises bees and makes the best honey I have ever tasted. Here is one of his jars.

Auction

Down Lincoln Road

I took a ride down the backroads of Tullahoma, Tennessee. I saw lots of good painting scenes, but nowhere to pull over and get out of the traffic. So I snapped a smartphone shot of this scene while at a 4-way stop. I looked at it later and saw the possibilities.

Click here to bid in the auction.

Big Mountain

My sister is not above the occasional curbside scrounging. So, when someone left a 3 foot by 4 foot white canvas out by the road, she scarfed it up, brought it to my house and left it at my house with a brief set of instructions... "Paint something."

The actual commission involved filling a vacant spot above the bed in the master bedroom of my mother's house. We are trying to sell this house and my sister believes it would make a nicer impression with something colorful there.

Not to be intimidated, I broke out my old acrylics and found some reference photographs from our 2007 trip to Colorado. Here are some snapshots of the process: (The brown color is what I toned it with using acrylic medium.)

















Three feet by four feet. Acrylic on canvas. Title: "Big Mountain" Thanks for looking!

Pet Portrait

This is a recently finished pet portrait commissioned piece.​ 

I used a conte pencil for the darks and a white prismacolor pencil for the highlights.

Arts and Crafts Show summary

It was a lot of work to get ready, setup and takedown, but overall, it was worth it. I sold several paintings, notecards, and drawings and put several on hold for delivery later. I also got one sure commission and several maybe's. In one case a buyer bought three paintings online before the show when she saw my announcement about the show. Then she came by my house the day after and bought three more!

What kept me very busy was doing drawings of children's faces. Our idea was to draw people into my booth by offering pencil portraits for $5.00 each. At several points during the day, they were lined up to get their child's portrait...some with three or four kids each. However, I don't remember selling any paintings from this.

I had printed a three-fold color brochure and had an FAQ sheet to give out... for whatever that is worth. I didn't give out near as many of these as I had anticipated.

Here are some photos of the event. 

My Booth.

Here are just a few of the many kids faces I drew.

At one point, a mother wanted me to draw both her boys together, but one of them was just out of infancy and could not hold still. She gave him a smartphone with a movie playing and I was just able to capture his likeness in between squirms.